Sorting By Financial Years In Power BI

I get this question a lot in many of the live trainings that I do, and it’s how can I sort my dates by the financial year.

Now, obviously, not everyone’s year runs over the calendar dates or the calendar year.

Your financial year might start at July, it might start in August, November, something like that.

Not only that, your quarters will also be in different order too because Quarter 1 might not be January to March, it might be July to September. So you need to somehow figure out, how to sort your date tables to manage this.

In this example, I show you exactly how to do it. It’s actually not too difficult. The key thing that you need to know first is how to actually sort any column inside of a table, and so I certainly show you how to do that.

From that, we need to add just a little bit of logic based on our financial year into the date table. Then we can use that as a sorting column for our months or quarters.

That’s it…just a little bit to it.

Once you do this once or twice, you’ll certainly understand it for the future and be able to implement it relatively easily and seamlessly into your models, especially around when you have to adjust them or alter them by the financial years that you’re working in.

This could also be very relevant for custom calendars, as well, because I know with customer calendars sometimes your weeks and months are aligned differently to the standard calendar year dates. You could apply this very same technique in those sort columns in that scenario also.

Good luck with implementing this one. Certainly not too difficult but certainly worth learning and implementing in your own models.